On 2014-11-18 19:09, Christian Thalinger wrote:
On Nov 18, 2014, at 7:36 AM, Magnus Ihse Bursie <magnus.ihse.bur...@oracle.com>
wrote:
On 2014-11-18 01:59, Christian Thalinger wrote:
On Nov 17, 2014, at 4:11 AM, Magnus Ihse Bursie <magnus.ihse.bur...@oracle.com>
wrote:
On 2014-11-14 21:44, Dean Long wrote:
The distribution exception is there exactly since anyone should be able to
distribute the files with their configure script. That does not mean that you
are allowed to edit it, though.
What if we require Autoconf to be installed on the host? Does that solve any
problems?
No, unfortunately not.
Why not?
Autoconf picks up these files automatically from the build-aux directory.
That's also the reason we need to rename the original files and provide
wrappers with the same name, since we can't even redirect that functionality to
a file with another name.
So do I understand you correctly that the files we need are automatically
copied into the workspace but since we want to use our own, old versions we
renamed them and use these instead?
No, I will try to clarify.
Autoconf is a tool that takes one (or more) input files (written in m4
macro language) and generates a shell script, often named "configure".
This shell script is what you would typically run to configure your
project. Autoconf defines an API of m4 macros specifically for configure
scripts which is basically what makes it useful. Most of these macros
are expanded into the generated configure script.
However, for reasons unknown to us, some of the more complex
functionality has been split out into separate shell script "library"
files. These library files, often referred to as "build-aux" are
supposed to be distributed with the project source code, along with the
generated configure script. We distribute them in
common/autoconf/build-aux. These files can be found in the source
distribution of autoconf or by downloading from the official scm repo
for them. They are not part of the binary distribution of autoconf on my
Ubuntu system at least. For this reason, it wouldn't help requiring
autoconf to be installed as that wouldn't provide the files.
For non GPL projects to be able to distribute the files in build-aux,
they come with a special exception to GPL, which basically allows them
to be freely distributed as long as they are part of a configure script.
This exception does not seem to give any exception for deriving work
from them.
/Erik
